Retirement Works... Until it Doesn't
It shows up in a small moments, nothing important, just part of a normal day. You finish something you had planned to do.
Maybe a project, or a few errands, and for a little while there’s nothing that needs your attention. No deadlines, no calls to return, no one waiting on you for a decision.
That used to be the goal, and for a long time retirement felt exactly the way you thought it would.
Then, every once in a while, a thought slips in that doesn’t quite fit. Not a complaint, not regret, just something that catches you off guard a little. Something like, “Is this it?”
It doesn’t stay long, and the day moves on. But after a while you begin to notice that feeling comes back, just often enough to make you pause for a second when it does.
What makes it hard to pin down is that nothing is actually wrong. You don’t miss the pressure or the parts of work that made retirement look like a pretty good idea in the first place. If anything, you still think you made the right decision.
And yet that thought keeps showing up.
It takes a while to understand what’s behind it, and even then it’s not something you arrive at all at once. It’s more a matter of noticing when it appears, and what seems to come with it.
There’s the conversation that pulls you in more than you expected. A problem someone mentions that stays with you longer than expected. The sense that you might still have something useful to offer, even if you’re no longer sure what that looks like.
Nothing dramatic, just a pattern of thoughts that starts to repeat.
And once you notice it, you begin to hear it in other people as well. Not directly, because it rarely comes up that way, but in the way people talk about their days, or what they’re doing now, or what they might be thinking about doing next.
Not everyone feels it the same way, but it shows up often enough to be hard to ignore.
If you’ve had that moment, even once, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And you know why I’ve begun writing this Substack.
Please join me as we explore the possibilities of UnRetiring.